According to Ars Technica, Virginia's legislature wants to make broadband Internet a public service like water, electricity, or phones. Hannibal, the Ars guy, is in favor of this (he also came down on people who distrust the FEC, and turns out was badly wrong), but I really cannot see why. He claims Government involvement in providing communications and transport infrastructure has a long and very successful history," using the USPS as an example. Is it a good one? I do not think so. The USPS is so "successful" that they have to be protected from competition from the likes of FedEx, UPS, and others in local mail delivery. Where competition is allowed, they have largely lost out to their competitors. This must be because USPS is "successful." That is what happens to "successful" companies after all, competition springs up from no where to beat them out as soon as a corner of their industry is deregulated. Lets look at some other examples. Since deregulation, prices have dropped and service has improved in both long distance and local phone service. Many push to have cable deregulated for the same reason. Competition uniformly has meant better things for the consumers. Granted, it also means slower availability. It took federal legislation to extend power to all of Appalachia, and many areas still do not have broad band Internet, because it would not be profitable to provide it to them at this point. Hannibal predicts that if we force them to do so now, it will magically become profitable at some point. Again, he uses the mail service. Has the mail service become profitable? I really do not know, I will take his word for it. If it has, why is the price of stamps going up all the time? It is up to 30 some odd cents, and supposed to go up again. Skyrocketing prices is not generally the mark of a "successful" company, I would associate it with a struggling one. After all, a "successful" one, I would think, would want to preserve customer good-will. Rather, I hear the cause of these price increases is because people have been switching to email increasingly, causing the postal service to have to raise profits to cover expenses, causing more people to switch to email… yeah, that sounds like such a great example of public-private partnerships to me. No wonder why I am not enthused with this proposal.
